First-Year Dinner Report

One of the self-imposed duties that comes with the job is attending the dinner we give to welcome first-year students. If that sentence sounds as if the dinner isn’t something I look forward to, well consider these facts:

The dinner consumes scarce and expensive baby-sitting resources (my wife and I both teach at UM; we both feel we have to go)

The preprandial cocktail party is held outdoors at one of the most oppressive and sweltering times of the year

I am always the designated driver and thus the open bar is just adding insult to injury

I have to smile a lot

I don’t teach any first year classes, so many students seem disappointed to meet me, focused as they are on what they fear is an upcoming first-year ordeal .

This year was no exception as to points 1-4, but very different on point 5: a surprising number of incoming students had found this blog, so they seemed happy to put a face to the rants.

And I happened to sit with some extraordinary students at dinner.

A Romanian (from Transylvania, no less), with a philosophy Ph.D from Stanford, supervised by Richard Rorty

An American fresh back from working in Niger

A Polish-born American who recently resigned a commission in US Army intelligence (in part, he said, because the failure to prosecute commanders for recent atrocities — an absence of command responsibility — suggested a failure among our leaders to hew to the ideals he had been taught he was serving).

A Khazakstani Kazakhstani national here on a Fullbright whose English is flawless

And these were not our international LL.M. students, who are always wonderfully experienced and diverse. These are a random sample of our J.D. students.

One could have quite a bit of fun teaching in a place full of students like that…